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UK and US subdomain. Can both rank for some keyword terms?

One of my clients has one root domain http://www.website.com and there are two versions, the US and the UK. So there are two subdomains uk.website.com and us.website.com. Both subdomains contain similar content/landing pages and are going after the same keywords. One site is supposedly crawled by UK crawlers but still shows up in US-based SERPS. Will Google take into account that both subdomains are going for the same keyword terms and only rank one of them? How is this kind of thing handled?

3 Responses

Who is the www version of the site supposed to target? I'm with blu42media... you most likely should just target the US and the smaller group of international people outside the UK on the www version, and target the UK users with the UK subdomain.

Beyond that... here's what you can do to clue the search engines into what's what in terms of international content:

Register each subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools, and geotarget it (see here).

Set meta tags or http headers to let Bing know the language and country (see here).

For duplicate or near-duplicate pages across different English speaking localities, you can try out the hreflang tags to clue Google in that they're the same page, but geotargeting users in different locations. I haven't personally implemented this myself, so I can't speak to how well it works, but you can find more info about it here and here.

The uk version of the site was first. It was beyond my control. I would obviously have set them up as completely separate subdomains. I'm just wondering if the key terms the UK site was ranking for if Google looks at that and only ranks one site associated with the root domain for a term like "iphone insurance".

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